Monday, March 03, 2008

i don't mean to exhaust you with tales of my kitchen, but...

I'm so punny, I just can't stop myself.

So we bought this house in 2001. Good bones, total fixer-upper, God-awful kitchen. Among the many amenities, functional and aesthetic, it lacked was an exhaust hood over the stove. Evidence was that the previous owner didn't cook much, but we do, and we're not afraid of frying, either, so it didn't take long for everything in that kitchen to be covered with a fine, greasy film. Eventually, this collected dust and became a greasy, furry film. Eeeew.

I'm not sure how long we had lived here, but it was probably a year or more, at any rate an embarrassingly long amount of time, when one of us noticed a window on the outside of the house where there was none on the inside. And, my friends, guess where said window was located? Right over the stove.

You know what that means, don't you? There is already a hole in the house in the very place we need one to vent an exhaust hood!

Yesterday, J ripped out the inside wall that had covered up the window for 45 years. Seeing as how that wall was encrusted with hideous urine-yellow and black plastic tile, no loss there!

It's a beautiful window, or it was before its frame was hacked off like a bad haircut, and I will hate to see it go. But the fact is that our stove will cover most of the bottom sash, and our new exhaust hood will cover most of the top, and the window faces the house next door so it's not too great from a light or privacy point of view, anyway. We'll be able to keep some glass in the middle. And I think we'll really enjoy it most with smoke-free, grease-free, fur-free air and walls.

A front-loading clothes washer, a dishwasher, and now an exhaust hood... if, as I have long believed, adulthood is defined by the point at which you start to care deeply about major appliances, I am middle-aged.

I have a house from the 1970s without an exhaust fan/hood over the stove (just like the one in Oakmont too!) and the windows sure get steamy when I am cooking, not to mention the smells! I think, though, it will be awhile before we get to doing the kitchen!